16 Apr ECR Profile – Jessica White
The ASAL ECR Profile series highlights the work of our early career researchers. For this instalment we present the work of Dr Jessica White.
Jessica is the author of A Curious Intimacy and Entitlement. Her short stories, essays and poems have appeared widely in Australian and international literary journals and she has won awards, funding and residencies. Her memoir Hearing Maud will be published by UWA Press in July 2019. This work weaves together Jessica’s experiences of deafness with those of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of 19th century novelist Rosa Praed. It illuminates how social Darwinism shaped deaf education at the end of the 19th century, and how the negative ramifications of this have persisted into the 21st century.
Jessica is currently a UQ Amplify Fellow based at The University of Queensland, where she is completing an ecobiography of 19th century Western Australia botanist Georgiana Molloy. The work illuminates how Molloy’s environment shaped her sense of self, as well as situating her story within the cultural context of gender and science, and the 19th century trade in plants. It also draws attention to the significance of plants and their crucial role in sustaining living things.
Jessica also researches representations of disability in Australian literature, and has created the Writing Disability in Australia research dataset within Austlit (https://www.austlit.edu.au/writingdisability) with the help of the Austlit team.